Example 1: Trusted Upstream Mail Relay

You have an upstream mail relay that accepts email from the
internet for a number of domains. This relay distributes email to the mail servers in the
regional offices of your organization, including your Sophos Email Appliance. You have
configured the appliance to recognize this mail host as a trusted relay. This enables the
appliance to provide:

correct reputation filtering.

better efficiency during spam checks.

a higher spam catch rate.

improved reporting (mail from their server will not appear on spam reports).

Valid emails , as well as spam messages relayed through your upstream mail relay will be received by the appliance . Both will be identified as having been sent from a trusted relay.

This allows the Sophos Email Appliance to correctly identify which relays are the first
untrusted relays ( and ).
Correctly identifying the first untrusted relays enables more accurate reputation and spam
checking, and significantly enhances reporting and troubleshooting.

This, in turn, allows the appliance to effectively stop
messages from external untrusted relays that are sending unwanted emails , while still delivering valid messages to the appropriate mail
delivery server that are sent by other external untrusted
relays .

Mail from other external (untrusted) relays ( and ) will continue to be received and correctly processed by the
appliance . Messages from servers sending unwanted messages
will continue to be blocked, and messages from servers
sending valid messages will continue to be delivered to the
appropriate mail delivery server .

A trusted relay is essentially transparent to the appliance. All incoming mail will appear
to be coming directly from the internet. This helps ensure that reputation filtering, spam
checking, reports, and logging will function accurately and efficiently.

Whenever a mail relay can be trusted to not be a source of spam, you should add it to the
trusted relays list. Examples of trusted mail relays include corporate mail gateways, mail
servers owned by business partners, or a mail relay managed by your ISP.